reunion, as written through a sleep study

Kate Choi, South Korea

N1 – the lightest stage of sleep, when you are just drifting off and can wake easily

The smell of medical cream, flakes of it in my hair. Weighted sheets the color of subway station turnstiles. It’s abrasive, knowing they might have known you. If I were younger, I would’ve called it coincidence. I bow my head like the attendant asks me to and pretend I’m praying to you. Patron saint of faulty wiring. Mother of absolutely nothing. The attendant’s latex gloves glide over my collarbones. Out of the corner of my eye, the bed blurs. I see you, stretched out and limp. The sheets a shroud, the bedposts mourners. It lasts for a skipped heartbeat. Then, the wires finish wrapping around my neck. The attendant slaps stickers on me. I am approved, ready to go. For one wobbling second, I think about naming you. Clear and unequivocal. After all, what’s the difference between a wish and a prayer? The attendant steps back. I lose the ravine. Along with it, the opportunity to fall. I am hauled away to a foam-walled room. I am stranded in more ways than one. 

N2 – a deeper stage of sleep when heart rate, breathing, and body temperature decrease

E calls. She says she’s calling to check up on me. She asks if we still talk. I say it’s a sensitive subject and press End Call so quick, you’d almost be proud. The screen, blackened, becomes a mirror. Idly, I trace the line of my lips and wonder if you’d describe it as a smile or a frown. 

I lie down on the bed with the screen pressed to my stomach. I think of how people made up dozens of words to describe you. None adjectives. I didn’t know how to correct them, so I sat on the floor, useless and mournful, gazing up at you like you were architecture. I watched your face not break. You were one of the people I could never parse. That is, your

performance of care was better than anything real I received that year. I screw on my AirPods and don’t let myself think of playing our song. E’s mistake was assuming we ever talked in the first place. 

N3 – the deepest stage of sleep, important for recovery, growth, and immune function

I have an hour between sessions. I go out, look at the loosening winds. Scattered stones. A bricked-up door. People scattered across the grass, talking smooth jargon into their phones. The children, the ones I label too-young-for-this and hate myself for doing so. I pull out my 

phone and write a paragraph comparing you to a dead rockstar. I don’t know if you are either of those. I think I will live most of my life not knowing. Halfway back to the hospital, I re-read it. Label it derivative, label it pretentious. Face the other end of the knife—tell myself this is how it feels. There are crimes I have never atoned for. Those are the crimes I’ll never find a home for. I read it a third time. I delete it. I think you’d help me laugh at this, help me see the words as words and nothing more. I think you are the reason any of this is happening. At the hospital front doors, I raise hell. I say it will be a false negative. I say it will be a false positive. I say nobody will believe me either way. I don’t say that all outcomes lead to hating you. 

REM – the stage when the brain is highly active and memory and learning are processed

They tear the wires off me, tell me that I should feel liberated. I do not call it an untethering, not in front of them. As I shake the numbness out of my hands, I look around. The bed has not relocated. The air is ethanol-filled and heavy. You are someone I’d offer the knife to. In other words, nothing has changed. I take my first stuttering steps toward the sliding door, toward life. I understand now: sleep is a kind of purgatory. For a second, the only thing I mourn is that I didn’t dream of you. Loss and a different kind of loss—isn’t that the mother of dilemma? You had one, too. Achilles’s choice: overdose or boredom. I close my eyes. This close, I say to you. I was always this close.

Kate Choi is a creative writer from South Korea. She is an alumna of Iowa Young Writers' Studio and Kenyon Writers Workshop, as well as an Adroit Journal Poetry Mentee. She is a poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her work is published or forthcoming in Rust & Moth, ALOCASIA, and more. You can find her online at https://katechoi.carrd.co/.